As Deutsche Entertainment (DEAG) posts its 2024 year-end financial results, CEO Detlef Kornett speaks to IQ about the firm’s “tough but transformational” year.

On Friday, the Berlin-based promoter, events operator and ticketing company reported the highest revenue result in the company’s history: €369.8 million – up 17.9% year on year.

With over 11 million tickets sold in the DEAG Group in 2024 (previous year: 10 million), the rapidly expanding ticketing business was particularly successful, as was the Spoken Word & Literary Events division.

The Group’s increased revenue can also be partly attributed to its bullish M&A strategy, which this year included the acquisitions of UK-based promoter and live entertainment organiser ShowPlanr, German festival organiser black mamba Event & Marketing and Italian rock promoter MC2 Live.

“MC2 Live co-founder Andrea Pieroni is a big asset within the European network”

“M&A is an essential part of our business, so there hasn’t been a year when we haven’t acquired new companies,” says Kornett. “I think we made fewer acquisitions than usual in 2024, but with MC2 Live, for example, it was a very important and sizeable acquisition.”

DEAG acquired Milan-based MC² Live in October 2024, bringing its co-founders and legendary promoters Andrea and Stefano Pieroni into the group. Over the past few decades, the stalwart promoter has organised numerous concerts, festivals and events with stars such as Judas Priest, Slipknot, Rammstein, 50 Cent, Ne-Yo, Eros Ramazzotti and Negrita.

“MC2 Live co-founder Andrea Pieroni is a big asset within the European network and we have managed to tap into new cycles of contacts and so forth,” Kornett adds.

Though he admits that the Netherlands and Benelux are obvious gaps in DEAG’s marketplace, the CEO is resistant to “expansion for the sake of expansion”. “There has to be a fit with the people and how to approach business,” he adds.

“It’s been a tough year and I don’t want to portray everything as hunky dory”

With the acquisition of MC² Live, DEAG is now present in Germany, the UK, Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, Spain and Italy.

“In 2024, we’ve not been outstandingly successful in just one country or one specific segment; it was hard work and everyone pitched in,” says Kornett. “It’s been a tough year and I don’t want to portray everything as hunky dory.

“In continental Europe, stadium acts and big shows were selling like hot cakes, but on the flip side, lots of good household names were clawing for every ticket to get to the water line.”

With former CEO Peter Schwenkow stepping down in March last year, Kornett framed 2024 as a “year of transformation to lay the foundations for sustainable and profitable growth”.

This is how the company explains a drop in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to around €14.4 million in 2024, compared to €26.4 million in 2023.

“It’s not a matter of if the weather will hit your festival, it’s when”

“With Peter stepping down, there was lots of reorganisation,” explains Kornett. “I have put a big emphasis on strengthening the executive vice president level within the company. We’re not on the stock exchange right now, but we are a company structured that way, and having a new board with all new board members just takes some time.”

The company also invested in a sustainability officer and the evolution of its IT infrastructure, both of which Kornett is confident will pay off in 2025.

An unexpected cost last year was the weather-related challenges in staging open-air events in parts of Europe.

“It’s not a matter of if the weather will hit your festival, it’s when,” says Kornett. “If it hits early enough, then you’re usually in an okay place because you’ve got insurance. But last year, we had to turn away 10,000 people at Nature One because of unsafe weather conditions. Then you miss all the auxiliary revenues, too. It was still a very good festival but the economic damage is done.”

“There are a lot of issues in the festival sector – from weather to headliners to costs to audiences”

Kornett says the company will continue to invest in weather prevention, having accepted that it increases the cost of putting on an outdoor event.

Last year, the company organised over 30 festivals and open-air concerts across the continent, but with margins decreasing, the firm has streamlined its outdoor event portfolio for 2025 and axed less profitable events and festivals in the UK, Germany and Italy.

“There are a lot of issues in the festival sector – from weather to headliners to costs to audiences,” he explains. “And when the rest of the year has strong events, you think ‘Do I need to risk it all for a small festival of the same genre?’  –probably not.”

DEAG Group’s rapidly expanding ticketing business was particularly successful in 2024, with over 11 million tickets sold compared to 10 million in the previous year.

“We have created a very good instrument to drive success for our events”

A steadily growing share of these tickets is sold via the DEAG Group’s ticketing platforms, which include myticket.de, myticket.at, myticket.co.uk, gigantic.com and tickets.ie.

“It’s one segment of a business that has a very good margin and now contributes significantly to the total EBITDA, but for us, it’s more complementary [to the success of the company],” the CEO explains.

“Having our own ticketing machine in the core markets helps us put our content into the best possible light and it allows us to promote acts that otherwise would not get the limelight on that day of the week,” he says.

“Having access to data is also very important and other ticketing companies don’t do that. But I can’t stress enough: we’re not in competition with Eventim or Ticketmaster or vice versa. We have created a very good instrument to drive success for our events and add to the overall mix of our business, and that’s really important.”

“Spoken Word & Literary Events is probably the most important non-music segment we have”

Another segment of DEAG’s business that has seen significant growth is the Spoken Word & Literary Events division, which achieved a 10% share of revenue within just three years.

The event format “An Evening with…” featuring world-famous authors has been particularly successful, as has the international literature festival lit.COLOGNE, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in March 2025 by welcoming around 120,000 visitors.

“Spoken Word & Literary Events is probably the most important non-music segment we have,” says Kornett. “I am very confident that there are more years of rapid growth in front of us, and we’re only just realising how big the audience is. There’s still a whole world for us to capture, outside of personality and literary events, and that’s where I think the growth will come from.”

It’s not just the Spoken Word & Literary Events division that Kornett is feeling optimistic about. If 2024 was DEAG’s year of transformation, 2025 is poised to be its year of success, according to the CEO.

For the financial year 2025, DEAG is aiming to sell 12 million tickets to concerts, festivals and live events

“We’re very confident that our EBITDA will increase significantly in the current financial year – I think all the signs are in our favour,” he says.

DEAG has already sold around four million tickets to events in 2025, achieving a new record for advance sales figures.

The revenue generated and already fixed is around €150 million and significantly exceeds the previous record of €129 million from 2021 for 2022, the most successful financial year to date.

For the financial year 2025, DEAG is also aiming to sell 12 million tickets to concerts, festivals and live events.

“I do feel that our two-to-three-year plan of becoming a company with more than €500 million in revenues will pay off”

This year, DEAG is organising concerts and tours by artists such as Sam Fender, Stereophonics, Andrea Bocelli, Till Lindemann, Lana Del Rey, Iron Maiden and the Scorpions. The tour for the 45th anniversary of German rock band Böhse Onkelz sold 160,000 tickets exclusively via the Group’s own ticketing platform myticket.de within just a few hours.

The firm is also expecting hundreds of thousands of visitors to its festivals, such as the 30th anniversary edition of Nature One, Mayday, Airbeat One and the Belladrum Tartan Heart.

“We’re not only looking at 2026 now, we’re also having bookings in 2027 – and not only at superstar level but arenas too,” he says. “For us as a company, that’s very helpful because it allows you to plan for resources and whatever is needed. So I do feel that our two-to-three-year plan of becoming a company with more than €500 million in revenues will pay off.”

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Independent music company ATC Group has announced the acquisition of two UK music venues, Brighton-based Concorde 2 and Volks.

Via its Joy Entertainment Group subsidiary, the firm has increased its ownership of 600-cap live music venue Concorde 2 to 80% and secured full ownership of JTR Productions for a total of £2.49 million (€2.97m). JTR provides bar and associated services for festivals including Brighton’s On the Beach (cap. 80,000) and Pride in the Park as part of Brighton Pride Festival (50,000).

Separately, Joy has acquired 60% of 300-cap late-night venue Volks for £400,000. ATC snapped up a 60% stake in Joy in February 2024, through which it gained an initial minority interest in Concorde 2.

“The increased ownership of Concorde 2, together with Volks, means that the group’s foothold in the live venue and festival space is now further strengthened, and will enable ATC to leverage industry insights from its wide range of services and touch points across the music value chain to drive intelligent, data-led live bookings aligned to consumer demand,” says the firm.

“By expanding our live events and experiences segment through Concorde 2 and Volks, we have reinforced our presence in this space”

London-headquartered ATC, whose portfolio includes agency ATC Live, ATC Management, merchandise firm Sandbag and livestreaming business Driift, listed on the Aquis Growth Market in London in December 2021. It revealed last month that it was considering a switch to the London Stock Exchange after more than doubling its revenue in 2024.

According to the company, the latest deals will enhance its “cross-selling potential”, while strengthening its “ability to offer end-to-end service delivery to artists across an increasing range of creative and commercial needs”.

“Live events remain a crucial part of the music industry, and by expanding our live events and experiences segment through Concorde 2 and Volks, we have reinforced our presence in this space,” says ATC Group CEO Adam Driscoll. “Importantly, it aligns with our ambition to provide a fully integrated service, supporting artists across every aspect of their careers, and enhances our extensive music services platform to create a better connection between the artist and the fan.

“We are delighted to be working with the teams at Concorde 2 and Volks who bring a wealth of experience of operating independent venues and who share our values and ethos of preserving and supporting independent music venues. With their established reputations in prime locations, both venues are well positioned to contribute meaningfully to the group’s future growth.”

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For the first time in Superstruct’s nine-year history, co-founder and chairman James Barton has spoken at length about his company’s meteoric growth.

The Creamfields founder and former Live Nation president of electronic music co-founded Superstruct in 2017 alongside Roderik Schlösser, who at the time was with Providence Equity, but subsequently joined Superstruct as CEO.

In yesterday’s Hotseat interview at the International Live Music Conference (ILMC), Barton explained how the London-based firm became the world’s second-largest festival promoter in just six years.

“We knew what we wanted to try and do in terms of the level of investments we wanted to make,” he said.

“We knew what we wanted to try and do in terms of the level of investments we wanted to make”

“But we knew that we needed to move in such a way to try and generate enough scale before people really woke up to the fact that an organisation out there that had a really strong vision and a mission to create another live entertainment company based out of Europe.”

In the company’s first year, it invested in a swathe of festivals across Europe including Sziget (HU), elrow (ES), Wacken Open Air (DE) and Parookaville (DE) – inevitably attracting attention from the rest of the industry.

“There was a bit of scepticism at the beginning,” he admitted. “It wasn’t until a few years later that I think people realised that there was really a real strategy behind this, and there was going to be a theme around what festivals, what organisations, what people we would try and bring on board.”

Today, Superstruct owns and operates over 80 music festivals across Europe and Australia, including Wacken Open Air, Parookaville, Tinderbox, Sónar, Øya, Arenal Sound, Kendal Calling and Boardmasters. Even throughout Covid, the London-based firm maintained a bullish M&A strategy – something Barton thanked Providence Equity for.

“We do our best never to talk about ownership, we talk about partnership”

“Did we think we could build a business of size and scale? Yes, we did” he continued. “But we also realised that to be the home for these festival entrepreneurs, we need to create the right environment, the right way of working, the right governance model, the right financial model.

“The core philosophy of the business is that it’s about the festivals. It’s about the owners of the festivals. It’s not about us. That’s why we haven’t done an interview. We do our best never to talk about ownership, we talk about partnership. It’s about the brands, and it’s about the people behind the brands.”

Indeed, Barton says that Superstruct’s strategy for supporting its network of festivals is to “manage from behind”.

“When it comes to things like creativity – music, policy etc – we stay behind the line,” he said. “But then as we started to build a bit more scale, the festival owners were coming to us and saying: ‘What are we doing about ticketing? What are we doing about partnerships?’ Then we would say: ‘This is what we can do to help, this is what we can do as a group.’ When you get enough scale, and enough good people in the room, you can share information, data and good practices. So then the power of the network starts to bring everybody up.”

“We are in a new era of our business with KKR and CVC”

Looking back on Superstruct’s story so far, Barton says he’s proud of the “successful and profitable” business he has built alongside Schlösser and credits Providence Equity for the firm’s fruitful beginnings.

“Providence was an unbelievable partner,” he said. “They backed us from the beginning and through Covid and they worked hard and continued to invest in us as a business but also into businesses coming into the group. But investors have a shelf life.”

Last year, private equity firm CVC secured a stake in Superstruct in October – just weeks after KKR’s acquisition of the festival behemoth was given the green light. Fellow global investment giant KKR had acquired Superstruct from Providence for a reported €1.3 billion in June.

“Now we are in a new era of our business with KKR and CVC,” declared Barton. “We’re still only in seven or eight markets so who knows, maybe we’ll expand. But we’d rather go deeper than wider, and have more businesses in the markets we’re already in to get the synergies going. We’re not going ‘South America is really hot, let’s get on a plane and figure out how to get in there’. We’re looking at where we can do a good job and whether there are good partners we can work with.”

Hinting that the company might look to expand its business beyond the festival sector, Barton added: “We didn’t call ourselves Superstruct Festivals or Superstruct Live. We called ourselves Superstruct Entertainment.”

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Deutsche Entertainment AG (DEAG) has set out ambitious expansion plans for 2023 in the company’s H1 financial results.

The German-headquartered live entertainment group is aiming to generate revenue of over €300 million (compared to €325m in 2022) and a further improved EBITDA compared to the previous year (€30.9m).

Throughout the ongoing fiscal year, DEAG plans to stage approximately 6,000 events across its key European markets and sell 10 million tickets (compared to nine million in the previous year).

These aims will be bolstered by the restart of DEAG’s M&A activities in the second half of 2023. The company says it currently has “several acquisitions in advanced stages of negotiation”.

In today’s H1 2023 results, DEAG says it is on track to achieve these full-year targets. Revenue in the first half of the year was at around €123m, compared to €133.4m in the previous year and €63.9m in the pre-corona year 2019.

EBITDA was over €5m, compared to €10.1m in the same period of last year – though DEAG notes that its major tours and festivals are primarily scheduled for the third quarter.

“We are leading our company into a new, exciting era that will be characterised by profitable growth”

Explaining 2023’s lower H1 results compared with 2022, the company says figures from the prior year still reflected rebound effects stemming from the pandemic, financial support from European funding programs, alongside significant events and tours in the second quarter of 2022.

The company’s results also reveal a shuffle on the executive board, with Detlef Kornett becoming a co-CEO alongside founder and CEO Peter Schwenkow.

Kornett, who has been a board member since 2014, will continue to head off international business affairs and marketing at DEAG and, together with Schwenkow, oversee corporate strategy and drive further growth.

“We are excellently positioned and will continue the dynamic growth of previous years”

Elsewhere, David Reinecke will take on the position of chief financial officer, effective 1 October. He succeeds Roman Velke who has worked at the company for five years, and who will continue to support DEAG in an advisory capacity.

Reinecke brings to the role global management experience in finance, particularly in capital markets and investor relations, garnered from his previous roles across cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, and Munich. His most recent position was director of corporate finance and CFO at the German bank N26.

Other board members include Christian Diekmann who is responsible for the business in Germany and leads the expansion of the Christmas Garden, and Moritz Schwenkow who is responsible for ticketing and technology.

“Just in time for DEAG’s 45th anniversary, we are leading our company into a new, exciting era that will be characterised by profitable growth as well as innovation and expansion into European markets and ticketing,” says Schwenkow.

“I am very pleased that the supervisory board has agreed to my personal request to expand Detlef Kornett’s position to the role of co-CEO. I welcome David Reinecke as the new CFO and at the same time thank – also on behalf of the supervisory board – Roman Velke for his excellent work and great commitment over the past years. We will use the combination of a competent team, excellent business and attractive market opportunities to fuel DEAG’s further growth momentum.”

Kornett adds: “DEAG has already founded around 20 new companies or successfully integrated them after acquisitions in recent years. We want to continue our successful track record in our M&A activities, with a focus on further expansion into new European markets as well as acquisitions to expand our ticketing platforms. As one of Europe’s leading live entertainment providers, we are excellently positioned and will continue the dynamic growth of previous years.”

In the first half of this fiscal year, DEAG organised events such as Disney on Ice and Riverdance as well as concerts and tours with Sam Fender, Limp Bizkit, Rod Stewart, The Who, Iron Maiden and Kiss, among other artists.

The company also had a strong festival summer with open-air events in the genres EDM, classics & jazz and rock/pop and welcomed more than 800,000 visitors to its festivals between late June and early September.

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